U.S. War Tax Resisters Gather in Tucson

The Spring 2010 national NWTRCC
gathering in Tucson, Arizona has been, as usual, a fruitful mix of experienced
war tax resistance veterans and enthusiastic, curious, and somewhat uncertain
newbies.

The agenda was less heavy this time than in the recent past — no contentious
issues like the Peace Tax Fund Bill to worry us, and an improving budget
situation. This left us plenty of time both to talk shop and to learn from
local activists about their areas of expertise.

Friday night

Friday night we viewed the new war tax
resistance film
Death
& Taxes and heard from Steev Hise, who directed the lion’s
share of the filming and gave us some insight into the process, and from
a couple of us who were in the film.

Film sales have exceeded our yearly projections already, half-way through the
year, and everyone seems to report that the film is effective in spurring
enthusiasm for and curiosity about war tax resistance.

Saturday morning

The meeting began, as such meetings often do, with a go-around-the-circle
round of introductions. This also included updates about what local war tax
resistance and other activists have been up to in recent months.

Erica Weiland addresses the meeting

Clare Hanrahan and Coleman Smith reported on their successful south-east
regional war tax resistance gathering that was held at the beginning of the
year. The opening of a new regional gathering (there’s a well-established one
in New England already) was a priority for
NWTRCC
and so we were pleased to hear both that this meeting went well and that the
organizers plan to make it an ongoing thing.

A number of people reported that their local groups were smaller and
less-active this year than in the recent past. Most attributed this to the
general dip in progressive activism during the Obama-sedation period, with
some saying that they’ve noticed progressive activists so eager to distinguish
themselves from
TEA Party
activists that they don’t want to associate themselves with a group whose
focus is on tax resistance and they meet our message with more than the usual
reluctance and defensiveness.

Still, there were the usual penny polls, literature tables, redirection
granting ceremonies, and rallies on Tax Day this year, competing with
dwindling but still sizable
TEA Party
crowds (that sometimes dilute our message and other times provide a media
springboard for it).

The Nuclear Resister

Jack and Felice Cohen-Joppa, who edit
The Nuclear Resister,
were our hosts and local organizers in Tucson. Their newsletter covers and
organizes support for imprisoned anti-war / anti-nuke civil disobedients,
including the occasional war tax resister.

They spoke about their work and about anti-nuclear activism in general, such
as the actions coordinated by an international coalition to focus on the
40th anniversary of the Nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty. Opposition to nuclear power has been on the wane, both because few
new nuclear power plants have started in the United States recently, and
because nuclear power has been greenwashed as a potential solution for global
warming and other consequences of hydrocarbon fuel. Jack thinks the
greenwashing is hooey, that nuclear power — seen over its whole lifecycle — is
neither energy efficient nor emissions-friendly, and that the nuclear power
industry is tightly linked with nuclear weapons and that the real reason we
have a nuclear power industry has much less to do with electricity than with
maintaining an infrastructure, knowledge-base, and the raw materials for a
perpetual nuclear arsenal.

There was also some discussion of the campaign to divest from Israel, modeled
on the anti-apartheid divestment campaign directed against South Africa.

Border activism

If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ll know that government
harassment of immigrants is a big issue in Arizona right now, as the state
government just enacted legislation that it promises will usher in a more
draconian crackdown on illegal immigrants. There have been calls to boycott
the state, and so there was some embarrassment that our group had decided to
go through with its meeting here.

On the other hand, we met in part, and many of us stayed the night during our
stay, at BorderLinks, a group that
specializes in ameliorating the effects of government policy in this area. So
we helped to support this work, a bit anyway, by our housing fees.
BorderLinks, at least, was glad we didn’t cancel our conference.

Reviewing a map of recent deaths of immigrants in the desert near the Arizona/Mexico border

This also gave us an opportunity to learn from local border-issues activists,
who had no difficulty pointing out both the close relation between our groups
(a number of border-issues activists are also war tax resisters), and that
because of the increasing militarization of border enforcement, war tax
resistance is directly applicable to their struggle.

The repulsive border wall, and increased border patrol enforcement in general,
have not stopped people from crossing the border, but have merely forced the
immigrant trails to be more arduous. Crossing the border has become more
deadly as the safer routes become more difficult to pass. Humanitarian groups
have responded to the crisis by trying to put bottled-water and first aid
stations along the newer routes, actively patrolling to come to the aid of
people who are lost, injured, or dehydrated, and setting up desert camps where
people can stop along the way. Such efforts are, naturally, subject to
sporadic government harassment.

What of the TEA Party?

Saturday afternoon I ran a War Tax
Resistance 101 workshop for people who were just getting their feet wet or who
were preparing to take the plunge. This group was eager and enthusiastic going
in, and, I think, came out of the workshop even more so, and with some more
practical pointers on how to take the next step, whichever step that is for
them.

The afternoon session ended with a group brainstorm about the relationship
between organized war tax resistance groups like ours and the
TEA Party
movement.

Ruth Benn addresses the gathering

Some of us see the
TEA Party as
an embarrassing distraction on Tax Day, and think it is important that we
clearly distinguish our message from theirs so that war tax resistance doesn’t
get confused in the public eye as some sort of
TEA Party
variant.

Others felt that there is enough common ground between war tax resisters and
some portion of the
TEA Partiers
that we might be well-served by trying to do some outreach, which might hold
the hope of introducing the tactic of war tax resistance to antimilitarist
libertarians, isolationist paleoconservatives, and the other radical
government skeptics who make up one tendency in the
TEA Party.
For instance, Joffre Stewart reported having recruited a new phone tax
resister from within the
TEA Party
ranks at one of their rallies.

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